Corbett's Houston Helpers

  We had a senior missionary family home evening last Monday and the sister missionary in the couple was from Brazil.  They are going to be finishing their mission in early April and going home, so she mad Brazilian food for everyone. The name of this dish is Feijoada. It is made of beans with sausage in it and put on top of rice. They put ground Yucca on top with some onions and tomatoes. The round bread has cheese in the middle and is called pao de queijo. She also made flan for dessert. They are an extremely nice couple and also work at the same English Connect classes that I am teaching at.  We had about 15 people at the last class. There are people from El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Mexico in my class. Two of them were attorneys from Venezuela and had to flee the country. If they didn't do what the government wanted, they would be put in jail or killed. They entered legally, but still have to pay $400 to the government to get their work ...

 We completed our first week of teaching Level 1 English Connect to Spanish speaking adults. We teach the lesson twice on Tuesday at 5 and 7, and then we review the lesson on Thursday at 5 and 7. We have people from Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, and Mexico in our class. Since this was lesson 1, we went over the alphabet, vowel sounds and some basic words. Velyn put together a very nice worksheet for them with a picture that they had to fill in the missing letter and then determine if the vowel sound was long or short. For the word "Old", I had Velyn take a picture of me. They thought it was pretty funny. In Mexico, it is common for the wife to call her husband, "mi viejo" which basically means my old man. One of the class members saw Velyn's missionary tag which said "Sister Corbett" on it and he wanted to know how to pronounce her first name (sister). Everyone laughed when I explained to him that it meant "hermana." Anyway, he learned a ...

 We have had our heartstrings pulled this week. We had a lady from Venezuela come in that could not speak a word of English.  She crossed into the US legally and had her green card and social security number. It took her and her husband and children almost 4 years to walk from Venezuela to the US. They had to stop multiple times to work for awhile to be able to get enough money to buy food for their family. When they finally got close to the border, they were kidnapped by the cartel and had to come up with $4000 to get released. They had a friend in the US that was willing to help them, but they have to pay the money back. Her husband started to work as a welder when they arrived in Houston, but after a few months he had such severe problems with his hip that he had to have surgery. It turns out that he walked all the way from Venezuela with the head of his femur missing. One leg is about 3 inches shorter than the other. The surgical site became infected and he had to be on in...

 I was going to take some pictures of the employment office this past week but forgot to, so no pictures this week, just boring text. I mentioned in a previous post about the English as a Second Language classes that the Church holds twice a week. There are 3 missionary couples that will be leaving soon, one in April, one in May and one in July. Velyn and I feel strongly that we should volunteer to help teach these classes, so we went to the class on Thursday night and spoke to the supervisor.  He was very appreciative of our offer so we will start this coming Tuesday night with the English 1 class. Since I speak Spanish, the English 1 class would allow me to work with those people that do not speak English yet. Getting them started and feeling comfortable in class is important, and then mostly English will be spoken. We have already met some very nice people who are dedicated to learning English and are excited to help then learn.  This past week I started having some se...